James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Last night plein-air painter Marc Hanson began a project of painting a month of nocturnes. His goal is to paint two paintings from observation every night in September. He'll post each day following and share his experiences.

7 comments:

DOn't know about whistler's technique w/ nocturnes but he was a student of lecoq - who emphasized training in memory drawing and painting - they were puported to have a system where they could remember shape value and color using memorized swatches in short its possible that Whistler memorized a scene and painted it later.

since the technique essentially includes 'painting' the picture in your head it would make sense.

Pyracantha competitions at the Royal academies of europe used to require you paint a history scene from memory /imagination here is a fascinating article about the tradition of drawing from memoryhttp://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-miscellaneous-shopping/4424231-1.html

I have never tried painting a nocturnal scene with natural media, and I was always wondering, how one should go about matching/mixing colors, lighting your canvas and such. I hope to get some insight on these questions from this series!

I did do some nocturnal sketching outside with a Nintendo DS which I found, in spite of my general preference to not use too much technology in art, a very useful tool. The backlit display substitutes an external light source and adjustable brightness allowed me to mute the lightness of the screen to match the lighting conditions without having to adjust my eyes too much. Also, its portability and speed are great assets.